Unaccepted Dinner Invitations
by Silberias
Summary: Mycroft sees a coffee-date and decides to do a bit of legwork about the case of his brother and Molly Hooper. He doesn't want to feel responsible for yet another broken heart if Sherlock was just using the poor woman to prove a point.


Because D wanted some Molly/ace!Sherlock, with ace!Mycroft looking on. In her prompt she said "that both the Holmes brothers are asexual, but not in this particular case aromantic." So, as acelock is near and dear to my heart (I spend a lot of time thinking about just what it means to me to be ace, how I'll ever cope with relationships, etc) I decided to take up the prompt. It was quite fun to write!

This also features some of my headcanons: Peter Guillam and George Smiley mentored Mycroft, and Mycroft is also "M" in the James Bondverse. Yes.

Enjoy!

* * *

Sherlock knew that Mycroft had bugged the coffee shop, which thoroughly explained the situation he was currently watching on the CCTV that his assistant had brought him—_F is doing something out of the ordinary, M, thought you ought to know_.

His brother had taken that woman from the morgue out to coffee—she'd been offering on and off over the last few years, and it seemed that it was this scene, this _display_, was how Sherlock had chosen to acknowledge the bug as well as the woman herself.

It was more than a bit cruel to the woman in question, in Mycroft's opinion. But, as he watched longer, the tableaux seemed to have a certain nuance of genuine feeling in it as well.

Sherlock's face was lined with a bit of a smile, and one of his hands was stretched across the table to inspect the woman's fingers. People rarely touched either Sherlock or _Molly_—yes, that was her name—and this was something that Mycroft could easily read. His brother because of, well, his own behavior. The woman, Molly, because, well, she worked in a morgue of all places.

But in Sherlock's case there was more than that, which was why it was mean of Sherlock to choose this particular way to acknowledge the bugged coffee shop. Molly had no way of knowing that Sherlock probably was at the limits of his comfort zone with holding her hand, and that she was unlikely to ever get the kind of relationship most other women wanted.

Mycroft decided to play scientist, then. Depending on Sherlock's reaction, he would be able to tell how much of this morning's coffee-date was genuine and how much it was to just mess with Mycroft's team who looked after his brother.

* * *

He arranged it precisely. First he informed his brother's security detail of what he was doing, so that they weren't alarmed when he appeared on their monitors and in their audio-feeds. Then, he figured out a day when Sherlock would definitely be visiting the morgue where Molly worked—and planned on being there shortly before that time. Molly would hopefully still be flustered by the time Sherlock arrived, and his reaction would bear out the truth of the matter.

"Molly—hello." Her trembling smile was a bit endearing, he had to admit. Perhaps the sight of it warmed his brother in the same way, brought him comfort. Mycroft didn't have to try very hard to see something soothing in Molly, though, so it probably meant that Sherlock saw absolutely none of it.

"Hello, Mycroft," her voice was soft, and she looked a bit like a cat with her lips pursed just so. Not some glorified sex object definition of a woman looking like a cat—but actually what a cat might look like if turned into a human being. Mycroft liked cats, so his smile back at her was one of his more pleasant ones. He could tell from the cat hairs on her clothing that Molly liked cats as well.

He didn't beat around the bush, to make sure that she didn't feel manipulated into it. Mycroft knew well enough the kinds of things Sherlock often said to this particular woman in order to get her to comply with his wishes over the years—by avoiding the same behavior, Mycroft commended himself to her with honesty.

"You know, my mother has just called to stand me up for a dinner we'd planned on—and it would be a shame to waste the reservation. I wondered if you would accompany?"

It took all of Mycroft's considerable talent at being straight-faced to not laugh at the exaggerated gulp that Molly took.

"Dinner?"

"Yes—this Thursday, I can pass along the details later today if you like."

"Why me?" Ah, good question—one which people all too often never asked in true earnest.

"When I ended the call with Mummy, I wondered who might replace her. I don't hold many people, men or women, in my social circle so it isn't odd—to me at least—that your name came to mind. That evening is free of other commitments because of that dinner reservation, so it isn't like I've got anything else that needs doing." Wrong, on so many levels what with having to train _yet another_ Bond to replace that one who'd gotten himself killed in Venice, but Molly couldn't know that.

"Can I have the afternoon to think it over? I would have to get the end of my shift—oh, well," she'd remembered what he did for a living it seemed. There were a dozen people he could send to find a replacement pathologist for a night, and it warmed him again to think that she understood that. "Well you know what I mean."

"I do indeed. Here," he produced a little card, with an address to a flat in Chelsea and his name on it, and handed it over to her. His personal mobile number was on it as well. The flat had once been his predecessor's, but had remained within the Service as a bit of a public-meeting place for agents and operatives.

"You can call me with your answer. I'd prefer it, actually, over a text. Have a good afternoon, Molly."

Molly nodded just a bit, holding the card with both hands tucked close to her body.

* * *

Mycroft settled in to review the footage—as one of the few places Sherlock would actually sit down and eat, St. Bartholomew's Hospital was thoroughly wired, bugged, monitored, and patrolled. For several years before his drug problems, and recently since he'd gotten past them, Sherlock had been an _F_. Unlike an M, who oversaw and controlled and managed, Fs went out of their way to break into the unbreakable places in the world—they were highly prized on the black market and Mycroft had long considered that one of his worst mistakes as a human being was training his own younger brother to be one.

Regardless of whatever other problems they had, it was this that Sherlock had never forgiven him for and probably never would. Because the constant hovering and security that Mycroft smothered his brother with was because without them Sherlock would be kidnapped within a week and tortured for information ruthlessly. Because try as he might, Sherlock still had the urge to break into things, to figure out the combinations—of people, places, log-ins, electrified fences, the lot of it.

The only luck his brother had was that he wasn't like every Bond that Mycroft had ever authorized. His status as a government agent hadn't gone straight to his head and fallen from there to his groin—Sherlock didn't lust after everything that moved like a lot of Bonds did, and it was so far an excellent trait. But with this new revelation concerning Molly Hooper, it did worry Mycroft a bit that Sherlock was accidentally implying things he didn't mean.

"Molly are you alright?"

"I'm…I'm fine." His brother cocked his head at the _you're bullshitting me_ angle, and Molly's shoulders hunched a little.

"Well, your brother came by earlier—and, well, um, I don't think that he—"

"Approves? Thinks that we can't handle our own lives?" If he were anyone else, Mycroft would have cringed at Sherlock's sneering tone. It was a credit to Molly that she didn't. Instead she laughed once and wrapped her arms around Sherlock's waist. Although slow to do it, Sherlock put his arms around her as well.

"I don't think that he even knows about us. Well, no—well, no, yes. Us. Otherwise I don't think he would have done what he did."

Sherlock froze on the TV feed. If Mycroft _had_ actually done anything, he would have felt a twinge of fear at that very moment.

"What did my brother do, Molly?"

"Just—he asked me to dinner. I told him I'd think about it—obviously going to turn him down, but he wouldn't have asked if he'd known, right?"

"No, of course not." Sherlock normally ignored the cameras—he'd been trained on where to find them, so he always ignored where they would be. Except for right now as, over Molly's shoulder, he stared right at one of them. His eyes were incredibly hard.

"And it's not like he'd really understand it, either," Molly babbled on, unaware of the terrifying look Sherlock was giving to the camera which was filming them. "Us, I mean." That broke the stare, though, and Mycroft was upset that he felt so relieved. He was also relieved that he'd been wrong about what Molly knew and understood about his quite asexual brother.

The smile from the coffee shop was back as Sherlock cupped Molly's cheek, and that seemed to be enough for both of them.

* * *

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